We must now turn to the great abbey of Old Corby, where, as we have already seen, Adalhard, a Palatine scholar, and a prince of the blood-royal, had retired from the perils of a courtier’s life, and become abbot. Unusual importance attached to its monastic school, from the circumstance of its having been chosen by Charlemagne as the academy to which the youth of Saxony were sent for education, in order that on their return to their own country they might assist in planting the Church on a solid foundation. The master chosen for the task of rearing these future missionaries was Paschasius Radpert, one of the most remarkable men of his time. Originally of very humble birth, he owed his education to the charity of the nuns of Soissons, who first received the desolate child into their own out-quarters, and then sent him to some monks in the same city, under whose tuition he acquired a fair amount of learning, and addicted himself to the study of Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and Terence. He never forgot the kindness of his early benefactresses, and in after years dedicated his Treatise on the Virginity of the Blessed Virgin to the good nuns, styling himself therein their _alumnus_, or foster-son. The deep humility of this great scholar is spoken of by all his biographers as his characteristic virtue, and is apparent in a passage which occurs in his exposition of the 44th Psalm, which he dedicates to these same nuns. In it he refers to the fact of his having received the clerical tonsure in their Church, and, as it would seem, in their presence. After expressing the reverence he feels for those whose names are written in heaven, and whom he regards not only as the spouses of Christ, but as the choicest flowers in the garden of the Church, he goes on to say: “When I behold you I sigh bitterly to think that this sacred crown, which as a boy I received before the holy altar of the Mother of God, in the midst of your prayers and offices of praise, I lost long ago, exiled in the world’s wilderness, and stained by many worldly actions.... I pray you, therefore, when you lift up your hearts on high, be mindful of me also, and implore for me the divine grace, that the most clement Judge may restore to me my lost crown.” In fact, after receiving the tonsure in early youth, Paschasius, whose tastes for Terence and Cicero rather predominated at that time over his relish for more sacred studies, abandoned his first inclination for the cloister, and lived for some years a secular life. Touched at last by divine grace, he entered the abbey of Old Corby, and there made his profession under the abbot Adalhard. All the ardour he had previously shown in the pursuit of profane literature he now applied to the study of the Divine Scriptures. Yet he only devoted to study of any kind those “furtive hours,” as he calls them, which he was able to steal from the duties of regular discipline, and was never seen so happy as when engaged